An eight-year-old boy was interrogated by police in France after his school reported him for ‘praising terrorism’.

The
child – called Ahmed – allegedly refused to take part in a minute’s
silence at his school, in Nice, on January 8 in honour of the victims of
the terror attacks in Paris earlier this month.

According to
Marcel Authier, head of the region’s public security, the boy’s teacher
said the child also expressed ‘solidarity’ with the Islamist gunmen, who
shot dead 12 at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on
January 7.
The child was questioned by police for half an hour on Wednesday, thelocal.fr reported.

Mr
Authier, who said no complaint has been filed against the child, said:
‘In the current context, the principal of the school decided to report
to police what had happened.

We summoned the child and his father to try and comprehend how an eight-year-old boy could hold such radical ideas.’

He added:

‘Obviously, the child doesn’t understand what he’s saying.’

Sefen Guez Guez, who is the boy’s lawyer, wrote on Twitter that the child admitted saying the words:

‘I am with the terrorists’.

But when police asked him what ‘terrorism’ meant, he said: ‘I don’t know’.